Paul Laurence Dunbar‘s ”The Haunted Oak”

In history this month we read Booker T. Washington's famous "Atlanta Exposition Speech" and selections from his autobiography UP FROM SLAVERY to show the context. In reciprocity, then, the poetry of Paul Lawrence Dunbar contextualizes Washington's words, and is in turn contextualized by them.

Lynchings in the South were peaking as Booker T Washington gave his speech to the Atlanta Exposition. Thus we find in the juxtaposition of poem and speech the real and the ideal, man's most evil deeds and highest aspirations. "The Haunted Oak" is curiously dispassionate, as it is the judgment of nature itself in the old oak tree upon man's inhumanity to man. The final stanzas disclose the psychological horrors of the perpetrator's "debt," and the violent desecration of nature and of nature's God:

And ever the judge rides by, rides by,

   And goes to hunt the deer,

And ever another rides his soul

   In the guise of a mortal fear.

 

And ever the man he rides me hard,

   And never a night stays he;

For I feel his curse as a haunted bough,

   On the trunk of a haunted tree.

 

"And the LORD said unto Cain, Where is Abel, thy brother .... What hast thou done? The voice of thy brother's blood crieth unto me from the ground."

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